Ted Grant

The Unbroken Thread

The Method of Marxism

Introduction

As has already been mentioned in the
introduction, there are many more articles and documents written
by Ted Grant than could ever be contained in a single volume.
Moreover, a section on the 'Marxist method' could, with
justification, have included any or all of these contributions to
socialist theory. Whatever the selection made, there would always
be some glaring omissions. The three items included do not easily
fit into any of the previous chapters, but the editors feel that
each one is worthy of inclusion in its own right.

The first item is reprinted from the International
Socialist of May-June 1953, and it defends the Marxist view
on the question of morality. At that time, with the post-war boom
beginning to accelerate, the capitalist class and their
ideological representatives in the labour movement discovered a
new-found confidence in their system. Right-wingers, writing for
example in the New Fabian Essays, sought to demonstrate
that the ideas of 'class struggle' and 'capitalist crisis' were
no longer applicable to the modern 'welfareist' state. Grant's
defence of socialist theory in the field of economics has already
been dealt with in Chapter Five.

But the right wing also regurgitated the
pompous middle-class philosophy of the earlier, Victorian
Fabians, dismissing the alleged 'crude materialism' of the
Marxists and basing themselves instead on a more lofty Christian
morality. In the golden age that capitalism seemed to promise in
the 1950s, it was the middle class, and not least the careerists
and place-seekers in the labour movement, who were guaranteed
their place in the sun before all others. Many of the latter
became senior Labour ministers, before betraying the Party as it
moved left.

Having been granted their personal 'socialism',
therefore, the philosophers of the right wing were uneasy living
with the radicalism of the post-war years and still less
comfortable with the memory of the bitter class struggles of the
inter-war period. The political 'morality' they advocated, as Ted
Grant explains, was in 'reality no more than a 'reflection of
their own middle class prejudice; it was shallow, and vague,
lacking either consistency or method. Today, unfortunately, the
same muddle-headedness characterises much of the political
'theory' of sections of the labour movement. Grant's critique of
Richard Crossman's essay, therefore, although written thirty-five
years ago, is still one of the most modern articles in defence of
the Marxist method and the morality of the socialist movement.

The second item is a document, dictated in
1966, in defence of the basic tenets of T'rotskyism. It was a
reply to an Irish socialist, Brendan Clifford, who put the
classic Stalinist position, using garbled and one-sided
quotations from Lenin to show how Trotskyism was a
'counter-revolutionary trend' opposed to the ideas and methods of
'Leninism'.

Clifford circulated his views inside a small
left wing group, the Irish Communist Group. His document was of
more than historical interest because the position he adopted was
an attempt to justify a Stalinist 'stages' theory of social
revolution in Ireland. That would mean that the first task for
the labour movement would be to participate - with middle class
groups and the 'nationalist' elements within the capitalist class
- in a struggle for the unification of Ireland, with socialism
relegated to some distant future.

The position adopted by the Trotskyists was
that there was no barrier between the struggle to unify Ireland
and the fight to transform society, that they were indissolubly
linked. The unification of Ireland on a capitalist basis was
ruled out, and conversely, the socialist transformation of
society would be the basis upon which the unification of Ireland
would become a reality.

But the starting point of the Trotskyist
position on Ireland was a defence of the general theories of
Trotsky and T'rotskyism. The reply to Clifford, therefore, was a
broad statement, outlining the early, pre-revolutionary
differences between Lenin and Trotsky, and showing how their
theoretical concepts compared to the living experience of the
October revolution. Trotsky's formulations proved more precise
than Lenin's 'algebraic' formula, but in reality both were
vindicated by events: arriving at exactly the same position in
1917 after having travelled different paths. After the
Revolution, both Bolshevik leaders considered their previous
differences to be redundant and they were only dredged up after
Lenin's death, by the Stalinists eager to peddle the myth of
'Trotskyism'.

The reply also described the rise of the
Stalinist bureaucracy in Russia and drew a sharp contrast beween
the 'four conditions' for workers' democracy laid down by Lenin
and the real situation as it became in the Stalinist USSR. As a
matter of interest, some of the comments made about the attempts
by the Russian bureaucracy to introduce reforms in the 1960s have
a very modern ring to them. Like Gorbachev twenty years
afterwards, Nikita Kruschev tried to move the sluggish Soviet
economy forward by giving 'incentives' to managers and by
'de-centralisation' of economic planning - to little effect in
the long run.

The final item is the speech made by Grant at
Labour Party annual conference in 1983, appealing against his
expulsion by the National Executive Committee in February of the
same year. The NEC had begun an 'enquiry' into the newspaper Militant,
on the urging of the capitalist press and Tory ministers, who
goaded Michael Foot, the Labour leader, with having 'extremists'
in his party.

The NEC eventually decided to expel the five
members of the Militant editorial board the day before a
parliamentary by-election in Bermondsey, in South London. As a
result of the preoccupation of the Party leadership with attacks
on its own left-wing, and the campaign of the media to highlight
the divisions in the Party, Labour lost what up to then had been
a safe seat. This was an anticipation of the equally disastrous
general election result later in the year.

All Five members of the editorial board, Ted
Grant, Peter Taaffe, Lynn Walsh, Keith Dickinson and Clare Doyle,
were given leave to appeal to the annual Party conference in
October. When their appeal speeches were made, contrary to normal
practice, the press and TV were excluded. As the transcript
shows, there was considerable sympathy among the delegates,
easily a majority, against the expulsion. But the big block union
votes, controlled by a handful of trade union officials, carried
the day for the right wing.

As the Militant argued at the time, the
expulsion of the five became the prelude for a wide ranging
witch-hunt in the Party and a large-scale shift of policies
towards the right. Increasingly, the apparatus of officials has
become tied down in keeping dossiers, organising enquiries,
closing down Party branches and constituencies and expelling
Marxists. Party rules have been modified several times, and even
then, bent somewhat, to engineer expulsions.

But it is equally true, as Ted Grant said in
his contribution, that those expelled will be back. Whatever may
be the subjective wishes of this or that MP, union leader or
Party official, there is no power on earth that can stop the
growth of Marxist ideas inside the Labour Party.

In the development of a mass Marxist current,
embracing thousands and hundreds of thousands of workers, an
invaluable role will be played by discussion, education and the
study of theory. The best and most class conscious activists must
be armed with an understanding of the richness, the breadth and
the development of socialist thought. This publication will play
a central part in that because it is due to the work of Ted
Grant, more than anyone else in the post-war period, that Marxist
theory has been defended at the same time as being significantly
deepened and extended.